only idiots want to be heroes
by rustyliver
Summary: Beca wanted to a hero once. Fight the bad guys. Save the girl.


Beca wanted to be a hero once. It didn't matter if she can't fly or didn't have the skin of steel. She just wanted to be brave. Fight the bad guys. Jump through fire. Save the girl. And if the girl is so inclined, she will give Beca a kiss on the cheek.

And from ages eight to eleven, she did feel like a hero. The girl's name was Betsy. She was Beca's bestest friend in the whole wide world. She was shy and timid and that made her an easy target. So Beca would swoop in and do whatever needed to be done to chase them away even it meant being scolded by her parents for getting into fights. It's worth it because Betsy would always call Beca her hero after.

But sometime in the seventh grade, Betsy found some new friends and they told her that her hero can't be a girl. It has to be a boy. So one day, she unceremoniously stripped Beca off her heroship by yelling, "Shut up, Beca! You're not my hero," which of course had to be done in the middle of a crowded hallway where everyone could hear her. And that started a rumor which lasted until high school.

Beca isn't the silver lining kind of girl. She thinks blessings should never disguise themselves.

But that one awful moment in her life did one good thing. It pushed her into music. With no friends to occupy her time, she started to listen to her father's huge collection of records. She learned about rhythm and chord progressions and tempo before she even knew what they were called. And during her thirteenth birthday, she asked for an iPod and a very expensive pair of headphones (which her parents happily bought for her to soften the blow of the news they were going to tell her three days later) to drown out the name calling at school.

Then when she was sixteen, there was another girl. She was nothing like Betsy. People can tell when she's coming from a mile away. In fact, she yelled her way into Beca's life.

Beca bumped into her as she was heading for Algebra. So Beca mumbled a half hearted apology and went her way. She didn't realize that Alice was yelling at her as she walked away. And ever since then, every Tuesday at around eleven, there was this girl who kept standing in her way. But Beca was small and the hallway was usually crowded, so she could easily slip between her fellow students leaving behind the annoying girl.

Until one day when the girl had enough of Beca's slippery ways and yanked her headphones off her ears. And five minutes later, Beca was waiting outside the principal's office with the girl whose name she found out was Alice.

Alice spoke really fast. Beca couldn't even catch what she was saying and she was pretty sure that they got out of detention because the principal was too confused to remember why they were there in the first place. Apparently, Alice was the captain of the debate team.

"You've got to get your head out into the real world sometime," she said to Beca. "It saves you from running into people."

They sort of became friends after that. Ones that said hello when they saw each other in the hallway and occasionally had long conversations about how much they hated high school. Nothing more than that. Because by then, Beca was so used to being alone, she didn't know how to be close to another person.

When it came time for Alice's senior prom, out of nowhere, she asked Beca to be her date.

"Do you know what people say about me?" Beca asked her.

"She's that tiny emo kid with the too huge headphones?"

"No, that other thing…" Alice shrugged, waiting for Beca to say it out loud. "About how I'm," she didn't think it would be so hard to say it when other people had spat it to her face many times, "I'm," she suddenly teared up when she wasn't feeling sad or even feeling anything at all. "I'm gay," she finally said it. She remembers Alice catching her and how she smeared snot all over Alice's favorite blouse.

"Aren't you afraid?" she asked Alice after she had recovered.

"I like you Beca and nothing anyone say is going to change that," Alice said. "And if I wasn't moving 1000 miles away, we could've been something. You're a lot of work you know. It's like trying to catch a grasshopper."

"Did you just compare me to a bug?" Beca asked, half indignant and half amused.

"Yeah, when my hand gets close enough, you just hop somewhere else. It's a little annoying," Alice said with laughter just quivering at her lips.

Beca elbowed her ribs and turned away, huffing, "You can go to prom alone then."

But Beca did go. She danced. She laughed. And at one point she jumped on stage and sang with the band. She didn't think about Monday morning when the almost faded whisperings will turn up on high again and probably remain so until she graduated. Because someone else was being brave for her and she never had that before.

And at the end of the night, she found out that she didn't need to be a hero to get the girl to kiss her. She just needed to be herself.

Maybe that was when she stopped wanting to be a hero.

But then Chloe happened.

Chloe is as far from a damsel in distress as the moon from the earth. But she needed help and she was not afraid to ask for it. Even if it meant intruding a stranger's midnight shower and singing naked with them.

Slowly, Chloe pulled her into this world outside of her headphones where people didn't seem to acknowledge the existence of musical instruments. And Beca discovered that Alice was very wrong about it helping her not collide into people as much. Because ever since she became a Bella, she found herself butting heads with people (or specifically Aubrey) more frequently.

And she couldn't understand why it mattered so much that they were singing songs from a century ago rather than something from the recent decade. She was basically coerced into this and it shouldn't matter if they won or not.

She figured it out when they were singing a mix of Bruno Mars and Nelly in that empty pool. The relief in Chloe's smile after months of bad news and failure and fights with her best friend. Beca had restored the hope in Chloe and what better way to be a hero than that.

But it isn't over yet. She might have tamed the dragon and reunited the troops but there is still the final battle ahead.

That is why she is awake past 4 a.m., not pouring herself into a mix. Instead, she is in Chloe's dorm room with Chloe's head on her shoulder, eyes half closed and Aubrey perpetually nodding into sleep and screaming out random song lyrics when her forehead hits her laptop.

"How are you still wide awake?" Chloe asks sleepily.

_Because your hair is tickling my neck._ "Sugar," she says instead. "People always say coffee but sugar works better for me."

Chloe giggles. "No wonder you're so sweet."

"And you, miss sleepy, are a bit delirious," Beca says.

"But I'm serious," Chloe shifts, settling more comfortably into Beca's neck as her hands tug on the sleeve of Beca's sweatshirt. "You don't have to do any of this."

"Well, I didn't really have a choice, did I?" she says jokingly. "Isn't it like the samurai's code of honor that once someone has seen you naked, you're indebted to them for life?"

"I think that's—" Chloe doesn't finish her sentence and for a second Beca thinks that she has fallen asleep. But she doesn't turn her head to make sure, afraid that it would wake Chloe. But then Chloe lifts her head from Beca's shoulder, pushes away the laptop in front of them and moves herself in front of Beca. "I'm glad I did that," her eyes are now wide open, staring into Beca's, "because if I didn't, I probably wouldn't be here with you."

"I don't know about that," Beca says. "I mean you have a way of," her words are lost in Chloe's enchanting blue eyes, "of—"

But she doesn't have to come up with any words after all because before she does, Chloe kisses her.

And when Chloe pulls away, she says, "Of getting into people's hearts? I'm very charming that way," with a bright smile.

Beca rolls her eyes. "I guess you are. You caught me, didn't you?"

Chloe's eyebrow arches. "What does that—"

"Forget about the price tag!" Aubrey suddenly yells, interrupting their moment. She then looks at them, forehead creasing. "Did you decide on the final song choices?" she asks, blinking herself back into the land of the living.

"Not yet," Beca answers, narrowing her gaze at Chloe who has her back on Aubrey and is laughing quietly.

"So stop chitchatting," Aubrey commands. "We have work to do."

"Yes, ma'am," Chloe says, shifting and settling herself back against Beca's shoulder.

And Beca can't help but feel like she has won the battle already.


End file.
